10 For the Chairman Episode 26. June 23rd, 2014

Yes, there's a bunch of work that has to be done to get the ship into shape to even put it into the hangar. The ships were brought into engine and they were nice, but there's a whole bunch of cleanup in terms of the hierarchy, there needs to be a certain amount of physics proxies, both inside and outside, it needs to be broken up in a certain way so parts can animate and open and all work inside the vehicle system that we use.So there's a bunch of work. We're actually going to be working with the finalists, paying them actually, to do some of the finishing work, and then we'll take it in house to finish it off here.When that's done, we're hoping to bring it out with the Mustang, which was the other ship that we premiered on The Next Great Starship, and let you guys add it to your collection if you like.As far as the prices go, we haven't set it, but it probably should equate to something that is equivalent to its weaponry, so we're obviously not going to be selling a gunship with big turrets and everything for the price of an Aurora. We haven't finalized it, it will be commensurate with the costs of the other ships, but it's a cool ship.And also at that time I think we're going to see if you guys are interested in having some of the other ships in the game, because they're all pretty awesome obviously. The top four at least were pretty brilliant, so I could be quite happy seeing them in the game.So then, Next Great Starship season 2. Well I think we definitely... I liked it, I thought it was great, I thought it was a really great approach.We may make a few format changes, but I think it's a great way to expose the talent out there and get some different eyes and content inside the game. I think we will try to make this an annual event.

Well I think that would be a good question for Tony who is heading up the Persistent Universe side of things inside the project.Planets definitely will have a day / night cycle. We are looking at the possibility of actually giving planets an orbital cycle, which would really be a seasonal cycle. I don't know about the impact of the seasonal cycle so much on markets or closing up early or late.It's a really cool idea, but I think that would not be a v1.0 idea. It certainly would be a detail and nuance that we could add later which would probably increase the immersion.So good idea, the system handles day/night stuff and we're looking at how to make the orbital stuff, so we certainly will have the data to derive that, and the question would just be how does that interface with the economy. So that could be on the cool thing to add in the future list.

Well I definitely like making burning the shirt a stretch goal, that's pretty cool. I say if we get to $50 million, we burn the gold shirt.But in terms of the two organizations going to war and how they would fight, I would think that an organization would declare that it would be hostile to the other organization and then essentially members of the organization, if they came across each other, would try and attack each other.Usually wars tend to happen over pieces of real estate, so we are trying to add persistent aspects to the game, like we've mentioned an asteroid base you can fight over, or a space station you can fight over, and I would think that probably some of the organizational conflict will be directly related to persistent pieces of real estate in the universe, where someone's trying to fight for control of a valuable mining operation or someone's trying to fight for control of a jump point, or something like that. So that's kind of where I think the conflict would evolve around.Obviously we have some stuff that we have to do in terms of the instancing because we can't have 2,000 people all in the same area at the same time. But I think we've got some pretty good answers for that. So that's kind of how I see organizations going to war.

Yes, we are actually actively--on our list of things to do, is spectator mode. To allow people to come into spectator mode, and we were thinking it would be a really good way where maybe there's a couple of open clients where someone can just come in as a spectator.And we may even have an auto-spectator mode that we power up that could stream to Twitch and stuff like that, because it's definitely kind of fun. I mean we all around here right now are watching people play the game via twitch, and it's pretty informative. It's strangely engrossing.But our auto-spectator mode will do things like allow you to switch to follow different players and all that kind of stuff.So there you go, although before anyone starts [CONCERNâ"¢] forum threads, we will make sure that if that feature's enabled, it won't be in such a way that it could give away information in a competitive match that you wouldn't want to give away.

Well, I mean it's kind of hard to say. for me it's sort of, when I think about a space sim, I think sort of Wing Commander, Privateer, Freelancer, all qualify as space sims, they just have different approaches, and to be honest with you, I would say Wing Commander was pretty damn arcadey, in fact it's a lot more arcadey than Arena Commander is because there were a lot more short cuts taken in terms of the simulation, it was set up in such a way that you could just blast a whole bunch of Killwrathi because they were gimped so you would feel like the hero, downing wave after wave of the enemy, and I know people go back and forth, but I play all the games including all the other ones that are out here right now that I can play in alpha, and I'm pretty happy where we are.I think we're the most accurate on the simulation side to anyone by a long stretch, in immersion. I don't care what anyone else says, I'm pretty confident we are. And then it's really just a matter of the control input, and how that's translated into the computer that's controlling the flight. And you know, we're trying to make the game inclusive for a large amount of people.So the goal with the game is to make it pretty easy to pick up and play, and then as you get deeper into it, there's a lot of dials and knobs you can turn to make the dogfighting more interesting or give you an edge over another player who isn't as experienced.I always liken it to StarCraft or StarCraft II where you can just go around with a mouse and point and click and build units and fight people, but until you really know the rock, paper, scissors of all the units and you know every keyboard shortcut, it's pretty hard for you to compete with someone who's more experienced. And I definitely think that's going to be the case in Star Citizen.I've already noticed in a lot of the forum threads, and I talked about this last week in the post where we were talking about the flight model and everything, that there's a lot of people who in the beginning weren't used to what we're trying to do, because all past flight sims, including a lot of the present ones, go with a very simplified atmospheric model and then add some "space" trappings like I can go up or down or left or right, but they don't really simulate it to the level that we do, where we actually add... Every item has its own mass and gets added to the ship and changes the moment of inertia and the thrusters gimbal to fire at the specified directions, and actually apply thrust which changes the inertia, angular or linear, of that ship.So we're not doing any cheating and just saying all this sudden we rotate by 15° or 20°, it all comes out of the simulation, and that gives you a much higher level of fidelity, and also a difference in feel of ships. Maybe ships that would weigh the same and have the same class of engines, if one is more compact than another, then at that point it will actually feel different, it will rotate different at different speeds 'cause it has a different angular momentum, not angular momentum, inertia.So I definitely don't feel that we're arcadey, I do think that in every space game or space sim, you have to make some level of... You've got to make a call about what's fun and what isn't fun. Generally space combat in my mind would not be anything like the way it is in Arena Commander or any other space game you play because it would probably all be done by computers, well beyond visual range, and it would be about who's computer processes fast enough to create a firing solution.But we don't like that, we like to get on the tail and shoot people down and see the ships, and I definitely feel that Arena Commander does a good job of that.Are there things that can be improved? Absolutely, and that's what we're working on. We're gonna make it better with everyone's help and feedback out there, but I think, as far as a sim goes, we're probably more sim than pretty much everything out there.I mean besides just the physics of it all and the flight model, the ship itself, all the systems in it are individual systems that plug into that ship, and they all interconnect through power pipes and heat pipes and the CPU pipe, and the fuel pipe, which takes the fuel from the fuel tank to the thrusters and all that stuff. And they all interconnect, and if one fails, it can effect the other ones.Say if your power plant goes down or it gets damaged and reduces its power output, then everything that draws power from it may or may not operate or may operate at less functionality.It's all very system based. A lot of things should just fall out of it like a part of your ship gets ripped out with several systems on it, they're gone. So all this sudden if other parts of the ship required that system, whether it was a power plant or a heat sink or something like that, they won't function. But we don't have any codes "if wing is blown off do this," it all just falls out of the system.So I would say we're probably pretty sim-ish, and then the aspect is is it your definition of what you think is a sim, and I think it's gonna be so many people in this game, there's so many different takes on it, it's almost impossible to please everybody. I think in the long run if people stick with it, 'cause don't forget this isn't just about dogfighting, which is Arena Commander. Even right now the multiplayer dogfighting; team mode I think should be open to most people by now, but up until now, the team mode hasn't even been open to people. So you just watch people go in and it's a furball.Of course if two people are fighting and not looking at you, of course you can come in and start shooting at them and they're not going to be able to see you.So it's not really a good indicator of what the combat's really gonna be like long term in the universe, 'cause the Arena Commander combat's much more, ultimately, set to be fast paced than I think the final combat will be in the universe when you're out there for real, 'cause that has a lot more to do with your radar, and your signatures, and a whole bunch of other stuff that you would manage, and you would have a way's to go before you got to contact with someone who you were fighting, and so there's a bunch more that happens.Arena Commander's really the first pass to get out to the straight out there, rough and tumble fighting, work on the control inputs and the flight models, and a bunch of the little stuff that we need to balance.The ultimate game is gonna have so much more and we've built so much of systems in to allow it to do that. I think the potential's immense, and I think people are gonna have a lot of fun, beyond just dogfighting. Smuggling, or trading, or all the rest of the stuff.So alright, there you are. I don't know if that answered the question about it being a sim, but anyway, there you go.

Yes, in the Persistent Universe, the Arena Commander maps are a sort of smaller scale map.So there's one big technical move we haven't done yet in the engine, which we're in the process of getting ready to do and be doing some early work on. Which is moving from single precision floating point to double precision floating point.Single precision floating point, once you get beyond about 8-10 km from the origin, you start to have some precision problems in small distances, like under a meter. In double precision you don't, 'cause it's obviously a much larger range.Our goal is to have a system map be one unified map, so it's not split up and the address, space, in the system is the same from one side to the other side, and that will come with the double precision. In that case, what's gonna happen is you're going to have large areas of not really a lot, and then you'll have clumps of detail like the asteroid field and the stuff that you see in Broken Moon or Dying Star.So it will be a combination of nothing and high levels of detail, with some beautiful backgrounds.There you go, and it will be much bigger. I mean we're talking about we won't go fully accurate, 'cause that's getting really big and would be boring, but we're looking at our system sizes to be +/- 1 million km verses +/- 8-10 km.

No, you know what, I think we probably would maintain the subscription stuff, mainly because that's really about community content, it doesn't really effect gameplay, and it's a great way to allow us to be able to give a lot more content back to the community.So for now, unless we were doing so amazingly well on the Persistent Universe that we just didn't need the extra money, I would think that we would probably keep it up, because I really like being able to do a lot of content for everyone. Its nice to be able to film all these things, and have a whole team work on doing a 60 page monthly magazine, because I think everyone out there geeks out as much as we do here.So we'd love to share it, but unfortunately, doing all that at the level we do it takes time and money, and so that's what the subscription is for. So I think it will continue.

That's a question we've debated on a design side.I think what we assume is that if you can get into the orbit of the planet and you can communicate and request for permission to land, then we assume, even if your ship's pretty badly shot up and damaged, that they get you down there, then we see the sequence, then you're down on the landing pad, and then of course you have to get it fixed. You may not be able to take off until you've got all that stuff fixed.But we probably wouldn't make it so someone would show up in orbit, and then just be stuck there and have to eject or something.Who knows, in later stages, not v1, but as we get further into development where we actually have some free flight down on the planets, whether that would be effective and the damage would affect it. It probably would, 'cause it would affect it in space.